Charisma or Rationalization?

Domesticity and Psychoanalysis in the United States in the 1950s

Author(s): Eli Zaretsky
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Winter, 2000), pp. 328-354
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Charisma or Rationalization?
Domesticity
and
Psychoanalysis
in the United States in the 1950s
Eli
Zaretsky
1. Introduction
Psychoanalysis
in the
post-World
War
II
United States
presents
us with
a
paradox.
On the one
hand,
it was a veritable fount of
homophobia,
misogyny,
and
conservatism,
central to the cold war
project
of normaliza-
tion. On the other
hand,
when
many
of the most
profound
thinkers of
the fifties-Lionel
Trilling, Philip
Rieff,
Norman
O.
Brown,
and Herbert
Marcuse
among them-sought
to criticize social control and
conformity,
they
turned to
psychoanalysis.
This
essay
aims to
explain
this
paradox.
I
shall
argue
that both strands of
psychoanalysis-the rationalizing
or so-
cial control strand and the critical or
antirationalizing
strand-were
rooted in a common matrix.
To describe this matrix I will draw on Max Weber's
concepts
of cha-
risma and rationalization. At the most
general
level,
Weber
argued
that
major
social transformations
originate
in reorientations to
meaning
sparked by
charismatic individuals. Such individuals motivate their fol-
lowers
by giving personal expression
to
impersonal goals
or ideas. Associ-
ated with the
sacred,
charisma stands in
opposition
to the
everyday,
the
familial,
the economic.
Thus,
the founders of the
great religions
of
antiq-
uity,
such as Buddha and
Jesus, urged
their followers to leave their fami-
lies for an authentic
spiritual community. Eventually,
however,
according
This
essay
is
adapted
from
my forthcoming
book,
Secrets
of
the Soul:
Psychoanalysis,
Mo-
dernity,
and Personal
Life (New York, 2000). I
want to thank
Nancy
Fraser for detailed
sugges-
tions at
every stage
and Lauren Berlant for
important
criticisms.
Critical
Inquiry
26
(Winter 2000)
? 2000
by
The
University
of
Chicago.
0093-1896/00/2602-0008$02.00.
All
rights
reserved.
328
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 2000 329
to
Weber,
charismatic communities themselves become institutionalized.
With its routinization charisma
congeals
into
organizational
structure.
But it
may
also
reemerge
in new
antinomian,
anti-institutional
upsurges
that seek to
revivify
the
dying spirit.
At a more
specific
level,
Weber
assigned
charisma a
novel,
historically
specific
form in
European modernity.
Unlike the ancient
religions,
Prot-
estantism did not ask its followers to leave their families.
Rather,
it re-
defined the
family
as a locus of charismatic
meanings, sanctifying
its
everyday
economic activities and
giving
it an ethical character. As
part
of
a broader
process
of
rationalization, moreover,
the Protestant ethic be-
came a
"this-worldly" program
of ethical
rationalization,
paving
the
way
for
capitalism.' Eventually, according
to
Weber,
many aspects
of the fam-
ily
itself became
rationalized,
brought
into relation with other rational-
ized
spheres, especially
the
economy
and the state.
Only
art and sexual
love survived as nonrationalized zones of modern life.
Both levels of Weber's
argument
can illuminate the
history
of U.S.
psychoanalysis
in the 1950s. At the more
general
level,
psychoanalysis
was
born at the fin de si&cle out of Freud's
personal
charisma. That charisma
derived
especially
from Freud's
ability
to articulate a
historically
new ex-
perience,
which I have elsewhere called
personal
life.2
This was the
expe-
rience,
rooted in industrialization and
urbanization,
of
having
a
personal
identity
distinct from one's
place
in the
family, society,
or division of labor.
Whereas earlier mental
healers-shamans, chieftains, mesmerists,
and
the so-called
legendary physicians-had sought
to
realign
the
private
in-
ternal worlds of individuals with
public patterns
of cultural and
religious
symbolism,
Freud
posited
a
disjuncture
between the
two.3
Through
such
1.
See Max
Weber,
On Charisma and Institution
Building:
Selected
Papers,
trans.
pub.,
ed.
S. N. Eisenstadt
(Chicago,
1968).
2. See Eli
Zaretsky, Capitalism,
the
Family,
and Personal
Life,
rev. ed.
(New York, 1986).
3.
Ultimately
the
analyst
was the descendant of the
shaman,
herself the embodiment
of charisma. The French
king,
who cured scrofula
by touching
his
subjects,
as shown
by
Marc
Bloch,
The
Royal
Touch: Sacred
Monarchy
and
Scrofula
in
England
and
France,
trans.
J.
E.
Anderson
(London, 1973),
is another
early
instance of charismatic
healing.
The
legendary
physicians
of the
eighteenth century,
such as
Francis
Willis,
physician
to
George
III,
also
elicited confidence
through unique personal
skills before medicine became rationalized.
Thus the charisma of the
analyst
was the heir to a
long history
of mental
healing, brought
into crisis
by twentieth-century
rationalization.
Eli
Zaretsky,
is
professor
in the
departments
of
history
and liberal
studies,
Graduate
Faculty,
New School for Social Research. He is the au-
thor of
Capitalism,
the
Family,
and Personal
Life
(1976;
rev. ed.
1986)
and
editor of William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant in
Europe
and America
(1985).
His Secrets
of
the Soul:
Psychoanalysis, Modernity
and Personal
Life
will be
published
in 2000.
330 Eli
Zaretsky Domesticity
and
Psychoanalysis
signature concepts
as the
unconscious,
psychical reality,
and
sexuality
he
captured
the modernist sense of
possessing
a
unique, idiosyncratic
interi-
ority
that could never be
fully aligned
with the shared
public
culture. In
central
Europe
at the fin de siecle he
gathered
followers into a charismatic
psychoanalytic community.
Like
religious figures
before
him,
he
urged
his
disciples
to leave behind their families-the archaic
images
of
early
childhood-not to
preach,
but to
develop
more
genuine-that
is,
more
personal-relations.
In the
1920s,
accordingly, analysis developed
in
close
proximity
to new milieus of transfamilial
experimentation:
bohe-
mias,
avant-garde
enclaves,
and
gay
countercultures. In Greenwich Vil-
lage,
the Harlem of the Harlem
Renaissance,
Bloomsbury
London,
Weimar
Berlin,
surrealist
Paris,
revolutionary
Moscow-wherever,
in.
short,
people aspired
to a
personal
life
expressive
of their
individuality
and outside the traditional
family,
Freudianism was in the air.
At the more
specific
level,
psychoanalysis played
a historic role in the
evolution of
twentieth-century capitalism. Emerging
in tandem with a
new
system
of mass
production
and mass
consumption, analysis
served
as the "Protestantism" of that second industrial revolution.
Just
as
early
capitalism
did not
develop
without Calvinist saints who revalued
family,
work, thrift,
and
self-discipline,
and
just
as
nineteenth-century
industrial-
ization did not
develop
without the Methodist
awakenings
that trans-
formed the industrial
working
class,
so
twentieth-century
men and
women did not
separate
from traditional familial
morality
and enter into
the sexualized dreamworlds of mass
consumption
without
undergoing
a
charismatic reorientation to
meaning.
As a charismatic sect with a
special
affinity
for
personal
life,
psychoanalysis
theorized and embodied this reo-
rientation. It
thereby helped
to authorize the
profound changes
in
per-
sonality
and character that
accompanied
the second industrial revolution.
As in the cases of
early capitalism
and
nineteenth-century
industriali-
zation,
an extra- or
posteconomic ideology helped supply
the inner mo-
tivations for a socioeconomic transformation that could not have won
committed followers on its own terms.4
Like earlier charismatic
movements, moreover,
Freud's
disciples
went
through
the familiar Weberian
cycle
of
idealization, rebellion,
dis-
semination, institutionalization,
and routinization.
By
the
post-World
War
II
period,
when our
story begins, psychoanalysis
was
being
institu-
tionalized in the United States. Like Weber's Protestantism it was becom-
ing
a
this-worldly program
of ethical
rationalization,
with links to such
normalizing agencies
as
medicine,
the social service
professions,
the social
sciences, and the welfare state. Yet even as it was
being routinized, analy-
sis retained its link to its charismatic, anti-institutional
origins, partly
through
what Lewis Coser has called "the aura of close association with
the
founding
fathers," partly through
its relations to art and
religious
4. See
Weber,
On Charisma and Institution
Building.
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 2000 331
experience,
but
perhaps especially through
its associations with sexual
love, which,
as Weber
wrote,
appeared
as "a
gate
into the most irrational
and
thereby
real kernel of
life,"
"eternally
inaccessible to
any
rational en-
deavor."5
As
adepts
of a charismatic
institution,
U.S.
analysts
of the 1950s
were able to draw on these associations to
resanctify
the heterosexual
family, investing domesticity
with
deep personal,
ethical,
and sexual
meanings previously
attached to extrafamilial forms of
personal
life. In
so
doing, they
were
invoking
charismatic forces
they
could not
always
contain.
By
the
1960s,
antinomian
upsurges
linked to
analysis
overflowed
the boundaries of the
analytic profession,
the heterosexual
family,
and
the welfare state.
Simultaneously normalizing
and fueled
by
charismatic
sources, then,
analysis
was at the center of both the
growing
rationalization
of
personal
life
unfolding
in the 1950s and the
looming critique
of ratio-
nalization,
the charismatic
rejection
of the
mundane,
that came to the
fore in the 1960s.
In what follows I shall treat U.S.
psychoanalysis
in the 1950s as the
third of four
stages
in
the-history
of
analytic
charisma. I assume that the
first
phase
of this
history,
which ran from the 1890s to the end of World
War
I,
encompassed
a series of often-revisited charismatic moments in-
cluding
Freud's "heroic"
isolation,
his "revelation" of the
meaning
of
dreams,
and the formation around him of an
analytic
circle with its own
rites, texts,
and
procedures.
In the second
stage,
which covered the in-
terwar
period,
the charismatic circle had become an
analytic
movement,
and Freudian charisma was
doubly
transformed: diffused
through
the
mass media and rationalized
through professionalization.
Thus,
by
the
third
phase,
which
began
in the World War
II
period, analysis
had be-
come a charismatic institution. No
longer immediately
tied to an
individual,
it had become a
complex phenomenon, encompassing
a
profession,
an
evolving body
of
theory,
and a vast
process
of cultural diffusion in which
analytic
ideas influenced both
popular
culture and
lay
intellectuals. As
we shall
see,
these elements of U.S.
analysis
coexisted
uneasily
in
ways
that resonated with
larger
trends in the evolution of U.S.
capitalism.
As
the institutionalization of
analysis progressed,
moreover,
it simultane-
ously prepared
the
way
for a fourth
phase,
the
explosive reemergence
of
analytic
charisma in the 1960s.
2. Rationalization and
Psychoanalysis
From its
beginnings,
U.S.
psychoanalysis
had
always
differed from its
European counterpart.
In central
Europe,
where the
pre-World
War II
5. Lewis A.
Coser,
Refugee
Scholars in America: Their
Impact
and Their
Experiences (New
Haven, Conn., 1984), p.
20; Weber,
"Religious Rejections
of the World and Their Direc-
tions,"
From Max Weber:
Essays
in
Sociology,
trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C.
Wright
Mills
(New York, 1946),
pp.
345,
347.
332
Eli
Zaretsky Domesticity
and
Psychoanalysis
history
of
analysis
was
centered,
an older order dominated the
church,
the
upper
reaches of the
state,
much of
banking
and
commerce,
the
pro-
fessions,
and the universities.
Psychoanalysis
took
shape against
this
order and
especially against
the
traditional,
patriarchal family
form asso-
ciated with it. In the United
States,
by
contrast,
traditional
authority
was
weak.
There,
doctors used
analytic
ideas to
co-opt long-standing
tradi-
tions of mental
healing, self-help,
mind-cure,
and
empowerment
that
were characteristic of a
mass,
democratic
society.
Whereas in
Europe
analysis
tended to be confined to intellectuals and countercultural
elites,
in the United States it
quickly
became a mass
phenomenon,
both as an
influence on
psychiatry
and as a
presence
in
popular
culture. In
Europe,
an established
psychiatry opposed psychoanalysis;
in the United
States,
a
nascent
psychiatric profession eagerly
embraced it in an effort to
co-opt
popular
forms of mental
healing. By
the end of World War I the United
States boasted the
largest single group
of
psychoanalysts
in the world.
By
the 1920s Freudian ideas
pervaded advertising,
theatre,
and film.
By
the
post-World
War
II
period psychoanalysis
had
become,
in the words of
Erich
Heller,
"the
systematic
consciousness that a certain
epoch
has of
the nature and character of its soul."'
Always strong,
the relative
weight
of U.S.
analysis
increased dramati-
cally
when fascism
destroyed European analysis. Although
a
small,
di-
vided enclave survived in
England, many
of the
important analysts
in the
world
emigrated
to the United States.
Just
as this
country emerged
from
World War
II
with
unprecedented power,
so did U.S.
psychoanalysis.
And
just
as the United States was
attempting
to
export
its
way
of life to
Europe
under the
auspices
of the Marshall
Plan,
so U.S.
analysts sought
to
export
their version of Freudianism. What
happened
here was therefore fateful
for the future of
psychoanalysis
more
broadly.
And what
happened
here was tied to a
major
structural transforma-
tion of U.S.
society-and
indeed later the world-associated with the sec-
ond industrial revolution. Whereas the first industrial revolution had
begun
in
England
and created the
factory system,
the second initiated
the so-called American
Century
and created the
vertically integrated
cor-
poration,
a
corporation
that
organized
not
only production
but also ad-
vertising, marketing,
and
consumption.
The first industrial revolution
extracted a
surplus
from manual
labor;
the second relied on
higher
edu-
cation, science,
and mental labor and
promoted
the
expansion
of con-
sumption.7
Two
aspects
of the new
system proved
crucial to the
history
of
6. Erich
Heller,
"Observations on
Psychoanalysis
and Modern
Literature,"
in Literature
and
Psychoanalysis,
ed. Edith Kurzweil and William
Phillips (New York, 1983), pp.
72-73.
7.
America,
noted a British commentator in
1926,
had "solved the
elementary prob-
lem
...
still
convulsing Europe" (Philip
Kerr,
"Can We Learn from America?" The Nation
and
Athenaeum,
16 Oct.
1926,
pp.
76-77;
quoted
in Daniel
T. Rodgers,
Atlantic
Crossings:
Social Politics in a
Progressive Age [Cambridge,
Mass., 1998], p. 375). They
had created a mass
production economy
while
ameliorating
class conflict.
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 2000 333
psychoanalysis.
First,
new forms of social
organization
transformed the
workplace,
education,
and the
professions;
second,
new
patterns
of cul-
ture and
consumption
transformed the
family
and
personal
life.
Contemporaries
used the
phrase
"social control" to mark the
change
in social
organization. Although
it sounds ominous to us
now,
thanks to
the New Left
critiques
of the
1970s,
social control was
originally
a neutral
or even
positive concept.
Introduced in 1907
by
the American
sociologist
Edward
Ross,
it referred to a
broad,
general,
and
presumptively
desirable
shift in the
organization
of
authority,
a shift from external coercion to
internalized
self-control;
from hierarchical command to collective deci-
sion
making;
from
top-down paternalism
to
interpersonal, therapeutic
controls. In
corporate
and
government
contexts it meant increased flex-
ibility
in central
regulation, greater emphasis
on decision
making
at lower
levels,
and the use of feedback mechanisms rather than master
plans.
Social control meant the
growth
of the
professions
not
only
because
pro-
fessionals
supplied
a model of autonomous
collegial organization
but also
because
they generated
the
necessary techniques
of
planning,
classifica-
tion,
and
ordering.
Most
important,
the
professions developed
new thera-
peutic
modalities aimed not at
"sick"
but at "normal"
individuals,
not at
passive objects
but at rational
agents.
This was the central
presumption
of social control: the citizen or worker was a
free,
self-determining agent,
not a
passive object
to be commanded.8
In Michel
Foucault's terms,
social control meant a shift from
repres-
sive to
productive
forms of
power,
forms that elicited the active
coopera-
tion of their
subjects.
The
project, accordingly,
was
ambiguous.
On the
one
hand,
it meant increased individual
autonomy
and
democracy.
On
the other
hand,
largely
directed
against
industrial-era class
conflict,
it
suggested adjustment, psychologization,
and
displacement.
Early
on,
progressive-era
social
planners, seeking
an end to what
seemed to them the tumult and rhetoric of class
politics,
and
aspiring
to
pragmatic
and technical
solutions,
connected
psychoanalysis
to the
proj-
ect of social control. In 1927 the
political
scientist Harold Lasswell cited
Freud for the idea that
political protest
was often driven
by
needs that
originated
in the
private sphere.9
The same idea informed both the fa-
8. Because of the shift toward
greater autonomy
I
reject
the
periodization
"Fordism/
post-Fordism"
in favor of that of the second industrial revolution. Fordism is an
ideological
term. It
accurately
describes the shift toward mass
consumption
but
yokes
it to the
assembly
line
(Taylorization).
In
fact,
mass
consumption
and an increased role for mental labor devel-
oped together.
While in the short run
factory
laborers lost
autonomy
when
compared
to the
nineteenth-century "gang" system, by
the 1920s
they
were
regaining
it. The term Fordism
underestimates the extent of the shift toward mental labor as well as the increased control
that unions and other
changes brought
to the
twentieth-century
industrial
working
class.
9. See Harold
Lasswell,
Propaganda Technique
in World War I
(1927;
Cambridge,
Mass.,
1971),
pp.
4-5;
see also Fred
Matthews,
"The
Utopia
of Human Relations: The Conflict-
Free
Family
in American Social
Thought,
1930-1960,"
Journal of
the
History of
the Behavioral
Sciences 24
(Oct. 1988):
348.
334
Eli
Zaretsky Domesticity
and
Psychoanalysis
mous Hawthorne
experiments,
which at times
purported
to show that
workers were more interested in whether
anyone paid
attention to their
complaints
than in their actual conditions of
work,
and also the broader
shift toward
post-Taylorist
forms of industrial
organization.'0
These
early
efforts to link
analysis
to social control took the Freudian
idea of the unconscious as their
point
of
departure.
In the
1930s,
how-
ever,
a
strikingly
different current of
analytic thought-namely, ego psy-
chology-became
wedded to the
project
of social control. The result was
to
propel psychoanalysis
to the center of a new culture of rationalization.
Ego psychology
had
originated
in
Europe
in
response
to clinical im-
passes
due to
patient
resistance. Its core idea was that the
ego
was two-
sided:
simultaneously
an
agent
of rational self-reflection and the locus of
resistance to such reflection.
Thus,
analysis
had to work both
through
and
against
the
ego.
In the U.S.
reception
and
development
of the
theory,
how-
ever,
this two-sided character was lost. The view of the
ego
as the locus of
resistance
receded,
and the
ego appeared
as the
agent
of reason tout court.
The
principal
architect of this shift was Heinz
Hartmann,
the most im-
portant
U.S.
ego psychologist. According
to Hartmann the
ego
was an
apparatus
of
regulation
and
adaptation. Drawing
on neutralized or de-
sexualized
energies,
it could influence not
only reality
but even
sexuality
and
fantasy."
With its stress on the
power
of the
ego,
U.S.
ego psychology
dove-
tailed
neatly
with the
project
of social control. The thinker who best
grasped
the
possibilities
was Talcott Parsons. In the late
1930s,
Parsons
sought
to theorize democratic forms of individual character and social
organization
able to withstand fascistic and communistic
appeals.
Partici-
pating
in a
reading group
with
refugee analysts
in
Boston,
he concluded
that rational self-control could be
strengthened
when external
authority
did not intervene. When World War
II
broke
out,
he
urged
the
govern-
ment not to
respond
to antiwar
protests "hysterically,"
as it had
during
World War
I.
A
propaganda agency,
Parsons
wrote,
should assume a "dis-
interested" role and decline to
respond
"to hostile
interpretations
of
gov-
10.
Mary
Follett,
Elton
Mayo,
and Chester Bernard are
examples
of
post-Taylorist
managerial
theorists. On the Hawthorne
experiments,
see Loren
Baritz,
The Servants
of
Power: A
History of
the Use
of
Social Science in American
Industry (Middletown, Conn., 1960),
and Richard
Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge:
A
History of
the Hawthorne
Experiments
(New
York, 1991).
See also Elton
Mayo,
"The Irrational Factor in Human Behavior: The
'Night-
Mind' in
Industry,"
The Annals
of
the American
Academy of
Political and Social Science
110 (Nov.
1923):
117-30.
Mayo, incidentally,
was more influenced
by
Pierre
Janet
than
by
Freud. The
management
theorist most
directly
influenced
by ego psychology
was Chris
Argyris.
11. In 1964 Bruno Bettelheim and Morris
Janowitz, typical
of those who
sought
to
harness
analysis
to the overall
project
of social
reorganization,
wrote that
"unfortunately,
to
regard
the
ego
as devoid of
energy
and initiative ... remains the dominant
view,"
arguing
that Hartmann had shown not
only
that the
ego
was more
powerful
than Freud realized
but also that it could even
reshape
the
underlying
drives
(Bruno
Bettelheim and Morris
Janowitz,
Social
Change
and
Prejudice, Including "Dynamics of Prejudice" [New York,
1964], p. 50).
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 2000 335
ernment
policy-thus defeating
them in the manner of a
therapist
whose
non-responsive
behavior
[undermines]
a
patient's
neurotic
perceptions
by withholding
confirmation from them.""2 Roosevelt's
handling
of
the
depression supplied
the model. Roosevelt was
certainly
conscious
of
being
"the
object
of
'negative
transference,'
" Parsons
noted,
but his
speeches
were
"analogous
to the
interpretations
of a
psychoanalyst."
"One
of the most
important things
for a
very high
executive to learn is not to
speak publicly
too
much,
too
often,
or at the
wrong times."'-
Like social control
generally,
the
implications
of Parsons's
approach
were
ambiguous, suggesting
both democratization and enhanced auton-
omy,
on the one
hand,
and
psychological manipulation,
on the other.
This
ambiguity
was inherited
by
the new
corps
of
experts-aptitude
counselors,
forensic
specialists,
school
psychologists, guidance
counsel-
ors,
industrial
psychologists,
and,
above
all,
doctors-who were
charged
with
implementing
social control
during
and after World War
II.
Analysis
was at the center of this
project.14 During
the
war,
by
order
of
Brigadier
General William
Menninger,
head of the
neuropsychiatry
division of the
surgeon general's
office,
every
doctor in the
military
was
taught
the basic
principles
of
psychoanalysis.
As a
result, 850,000
soldiers
were
hospitalized
for
psychiatric
reasons.
By
the end of the
war,
they
constituted 60
percent
of all
patients
in VA
hospitals.
When doctors could
not meet the demand for
treatment,
the
newly
founded
professions
of
clinical
psychology
and
psychiatric
social work
stepped
into the
breach.'5
12.
Quoted
in Howard
Brick,
"Talcott Parsons's 'Shift
Away
from
Economics,'
1937-
1946,"
Journal of
American
History (forthcoming).
13. Talcott
Parsons,
"Propaganda
and Social Control"
(1942), Essays
in
Sociological
The-
ory,
rev. ed.
(New York, 1954),
p.
176 n. 17.
14.
During
World War
I,
when the
integration
of
psychology
into the
project
of ratio-
nalization
began, only
2
percent
of all American recruits were excluded for
psychiatric
rea-
sons.
During
World War
II
the
corresponding figure
was 8-10
percent.
In the first war the
chief reasons for
psychiatric rejection
were mental
insufficiency
and
psychosis;
in the sec-
ond neurosis was the
leading ground
for
rejection.
This
figure
includes both those
rejected
at induction and
psychiatric
dismissals. See Albert
J.
Glass,
"Army Psychiatry
before World
War
II"
and "Lessons
Learned,"
in the
publication
of the medical
department
of the United
States
Army, Neuropsychiatry
in World War
II:
Volume
1,
Zone
of
the
Interior,
ed. Glass and Robert
J.
Bernucci
(Washington,
D.C., 1966), pp. 3-23, 735-59;
Norman
Q. Brill, "Hospitalization
and
Disposition"
and "Station and
Regional Hospitals,"
in
Neuropsychiatry
in World War
II,
pp. 195-253, 255-95;
Brill and Herbert
I.
Kupper,
"Problems of
Adjustment
in Return to
Civilian Life" and "The
Psychiatric
Patient after
Discharge,"
in
Neuropsychiatry
in World War
II,
pp. 721-27, 729-33;
and Bernard D.
Karpinos
and
Glass,
"Appendix
A:
Disqualifications
and
Discharges
for
Neuropsychiatric
Reasons,
World War I and World War
II (A Compara-
tive
Evaluation),"
in
Neuropsychiatry
in World War
II,
pp.
761-73. See also Adolf
Meyer,
"Men-
tal
Hygiene
in the
Emergency:
Introduction,"
Edward A.
Strecker,
"Mental
Hygiene
and
Mass
Man,"
and
Harry
Stack
Sullivan,
"Psychiatry
in the
Emergency,"
Mental
Hygiene
25
(Jan. 1941): 1-2, 3-5,
5-10.
15. Carl R.
Rogers's Counseling
and
Psychotherapy:
Newer
Concepts
in Practice
(Boston,
1942)
was the decisive book
spurring
the
growth
of clinical
psychology. Rogers
contrasted
counseling
to classical
psychoanalysis,
advocated
mirroring,
or
nonjudgmental recognition,
336
Eli
Zaretsky Domesticity
and
Psychoanalysis
As we shall
see,
medicine
ultimately
absorbed and then
destroyed
U.S.
psychoanalysis.
Prior to
this, however,
psychoanalysis
transformed medi-
cine
by shifting
its
emphasis
from the treatment of
specific
diseases to
the
management
of the social and
interpersonal
dimensions of illness.16
Although
there were
only approximately
four hundred
psychoanalysts
in
the United States at the end of the
1940s,
they
dominated ten times that
number of
psychiatrists,
who,
as
department
heads in
hospitals,
oversaw
a vast network
extending
into such areas as
counseling, testing,
welfare,
education,
personnel,
and law."
The
results,
once
again,
were
ambiguous.
On the one
hand,
the ex-
panding regime
of
psychological experts
in 1950s America
gave ordinary
people
new vocabularies and
practices
of self-reflection. On the other
hand,
it
gave unprecedented powers
not
only
to doctors and
therapists
but also to human relations-oriented
supervisors, personnel experts,
ministers, rabbis,
and
high-school guidance
counselors. The treatment of
homosexuality exemplifies
the
ambiguity.
Before the
war,
homosexuals in the
military
were
imprisoned.
Con-
viction for oral sex could and did lead to fifteen
years
behind bars.
Psy-
chiatric
reformers,
led
by analysts, successfully fought
to
change
the
designation
sodomist to homosexual and to reduce the
punishment
to dis-
charge.
At their
urging,
President Franklin Roosevelt
pardoned
a naval
officer
charged
with
homosexuality. Progressive though
it
was,
this re-
form extended the
scope
of surveillance within the
military,
transferred
the
supervision
of homosexuals from the criminal
justice system
to the
psychiatric profession,
and laid the basis for the
heightening
of discrimi-
nation that occurred after the war. In
explicit
contradiction to Freud's
view,
analytic psychiatrists
redefined
homosexuality
as an illness in 1952.18
rather than
interpretation,
and
pressed
for the use of the term client rather than
patient.
Largely
as a result of his
influence,
psychologists
won authorization to use
psychotherapy
to treat veterans. Social work had
developed
its casework
approach
in the 1920s under
Freudian influence.
During
the
war, however,
the subfield of
psychiatric
social work
emerged.
See Social Work and Mental
Health,
ed.
James
W Callicut and Pedro
J.
Lecca
(New
York, 1983),
and
Ego-Oriented
Casework: Problems and
Perspectives: Papers from
the Smith
College
of
Social
Work,
ed. Howard
J.
Parad and
Roger
R. Miller
(New York, 1963).
16. In the transformation of medicine after World War
II,
Janowitz
has
written,
"the
formulations of
psychoanalysis
[were the] guideposts" (Janowitz,
The Last
Half-Century:
Soci-
etal
Change
and Politics in America
[Chicago, 1978],
p. 423).
17. In 1940 there had been
only
2,295
psychiatrists
in the United
States,
two-thirds
practicing
in
public hospitals.
In 1948 the
figure
was
4,700,
and
by
1976 there were
27,000.
See E. Fuller
Torrey,
Freudian Fraud: The
Malignant Effect of
Freud's
Theory
on American
Thought
and Culture
(New York, 1992),
p.
165;
Nathan G.
Hale,
Jr.,
The Rise and Crisis
of Psychoanalysis
in the United States: Freud and the
Americans,
1917-1985
(New York, 1995), pp.
211-12, 246;
Thomas S.
Szasz, Law,
Liberty,
and
Psychiatry:
An
Inquiry
into the Social Uses
of
Mental Health
Practices
(New York, 1963);
and Gerald N.
Grob,
From
Asylum
to
Community:
Mental Health
Policy
in Modern America
(Princeton,
N.J., 1991),
p.
3.
18. On homosexuals in the
military
in World War
II,
see
John
Costello,
Virtue under
Fire: How World War II
Changed
Our Social and Sexual Attitudes
(Boston, 1985),
and Allan
B6-
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 2000 337
Considered more humane at the
time,
this
approach may
have been more
insidious than
legal prosecution
since it was
likely
to affect homosexuals'
self-perceptions
more
deeply.
As this
example suggests,
social control was not
exclusively
a matter
of external
organization.
On the
contrary,
it also had a crucial internal
dimension,
which found
expression
in broad cultural currents of the
postwar period, especially
in the stress on individual
privacy.
In reaction
to the
vividly present spectres
of Nazism and
Communism,
freedom in
the
private
or
personal
realm was viewed as the
indispensable ground
for
freedom in
public
life. That
point
was central to such iconic works as
Hannah Arendt's 1951 The
Origins of
Totalitarianism and her 1958 The Hu-
man Condition. But
analysts
invested it with charismatic
depth.
Bruno Bet-
telheim's influential 1943
psychoanalytic
memoir of his internment in
Buchenwald,
"Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme
Situations,"
set
the tone.
Reprinted
in
Dwight
Macdonald's
Politics,
distributed on Eisen-
hower's orders to all officers in
occupied Germany,
and discussed
by
Ar-
endt in The
Origins of
Totalitarianism,
Bettelheim's memoir traced the
psychological
effects of continual
supervision
on concentration
camp
in-
mates.
According
to
Bettelheim,
the inmates imitated the
guards,
shared
the latter's
contempt
for "unfit"
prisoners,
sewed swastikas onto their uni-
forms,
and
complained
about
ex-prisoners
who had attacked the
camps
in the world's
press.
In his
explanation,
the inmates
regressed. Lacking
privacy, they
lost their
autonomy.'9
What made the
camp
so terrible in Bettelheim's account was that
there was no retreat from the
guards
and therefore no division between
public
and
private.
This idea resonated
broadly
in
postwar
U.S. culture.
In Arendt's The
Origins of
Totalitarianism the destruction of
private
life dis-
tinguished
totalitarianism from earlier
dictatorships
that left the
private
sphere
undisturbed. In
Stanley
Elkins's 1959
Slavery:
A Problem in
Ameri-
rube,
Coming
Out under Fire: The
History of Gay
Men and Women in World War Two
(New York,
1990), pp.
150, 158, 131,
259.
According
to
Berube,
Army
and
Navy psychiatrists began
their efforts to
discharge
rather than
imprison
homosexual servicemen in the
spring
of 1941....
By
1945
military
officials had bro-
ken down the sodomist
category
into a
confusing array
of
legal, psychiatric,
and ad-
ministrative
subcategories.
Homosexual
personnel
were identified as either
latent,
self-confessed,
well-adjusted,
habitual,
undetected or
known, true, confirmed,
and
male or female
....
In 1952 the American
Psychiatric
Association,
building
on the
standardized nomenclature
developed by
the
Army
in
1945,
developed
its first
Diag-
nostic and Statistical Manual
of
Mental Disorders
(DSM-I),
which
firmly
established ho-
mosexuality
as a
sociopathic personality
disorder.
[Ibid., pp.
128, 146, 259]
From 1947 to
1955,
twenty-one
states and the District of Columbia enacted sex
psychopath
laws. Such terms as child
molester, homosexual,
sex
offender,
sex
psychopath,
sex
degenerate,
and
deviate became
interchangeable.
19. Bettelheim's account was later
challenged by
other inmates as well as
by
Terrence
Des
Pres,
The
Survivor:
An
Anatomy of Life
in the Death
Camps (New York, 1976),
and Richard
Pollak,
The Creation
of
Dr B: A
Biography of
Bruno Bettelheim
(New York, 1997).
338
Eli
Zaretsky Domesticity
and
Psychoanalysis
can Institutional and Intellectual
Life
the absence of a
private space-private
property,
a
house,
a
garden, literacy,
the
right
to travel-is credited with
making
American
slavery
much more virulent and destructive than its
counterparts
in Brazil or
Haiti,
where slaves did have
space
of their own.
In
Betty
Friedan's
1963 The Feminine
Mystique,
which also drew on Bettel-
heim,
the fact that women had no
private space-that
the home had be-
come a
prison-made
their condition
uniquely oppressive.20
In the case of those
writers,
the stress on
privacy
served to
support
political critique.
For much of
postwar
America, however,
it fostered a
turn
away
from
politics
and toward
interiority.
The historian Carl Schor-
ske,
who
began teaching
in the United States after the
war,
watched his
students' interests shift from
economics,
politics,
and
sociology
to litera-
ture and
philosophy.21
Social realism
gave way
to abstract
expressionism.
Many
also believed that the atomic bomb
explosion required
more atten-
tion to
psychology
and less to
politics. Writing
in the
Saturday
Review,
Norman Cousins described "a
primitive
fear,
the fear of the
unknown,
...
[which]
has burst out of the subconscious and into the
conscious,
filling
the mind with
primordial apprehensions."22
The stress on
privacy
shaded
easily
into a new
emphasis
on domestic-
ity.
The dominant
ideology
of the
postwar family
stressed its
private
char-
acter,
the
way
in which it
protected
its members from the external
world,
including
even the American
government.
The
ideology
reflected the
shift from a class- and
community-based
industrial
society
to a
family-
centered
postindustrial society
oriented to mass
consumption.
With hith-
erto undreamt-of
possibilities
for
private consumption, personal
life,
previously
associated with countercultural and transfamilial milieus such
as Greenwich
Village
and
Bloomsbury,
now assumed a mass form for the
first time.
Propelled by
these
possibilities,
the immediate
postwar genera-
tion lowered the
age
of
marriage
for both
sexes,
reduced the divorce
rate,
and increased the number of
children,
a trend that lasted until the end
of the 1960s.
Meanwhile,
advertising
and
Hollywood
invested not
just
20. Friedan wrote:
"the
women who
'adjust'
as
housewives,
who
grow up wanting
to
be
'just
a
housewife,'
are in as much
danger
as the millions who walked to their own death
in the concentration
camps-and
the millions more who refused to believe that the concen-
tration
camps
existed
....
[Isn't the]
house in
reality
a comfortable concentration
camp?"
Within it women "have become
dependent, passive,
childlike"
(Betty
Friedan,
The Feminine
Mystique [New York, 1963],
pp.
305, 307;
quoted
in Wilfred M.
McClay,
The Masterless:
Self
and
Society
in Modern America
[Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1993],
p.
232).
See also
Stanley
M.
Elkins,
Slavery:
A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual
Life (Chicago,
1959).
21. See Paul A.
Carter,
Another Part
of
the
Fifties
(New York, 1983), p.
160.
22.
Quoted
in
William Graebner,
The
Age of
Doubt: American
Thought
and Culture in the
1940s
(Boston, 1991),
p.
20. Holden Caulfield's obsession with
phonies
and bullshit detec-
tion in
J.
D.
Salinger's
The Catcher in the
Rye
and Gunnar
Myrdal's
insistence in An American
Dilemma that "the moral
struggle goes
on within
people
and not
only
between them" were
other
expressions
of the new mood
(Gunnar
Myrdal,
An American Dilemma: The
Negro
Problem
and Modern
Democracy,
2 vols.
[1944;
New
York, 1962], 1:lxxii).
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 2000 339
specific
commodities but the entire
project
of domestic
consumption
with
the charisma of
utopian
desire. Whereas
powerful
ethnic communities
and industrial union drives had
organized working-class
life in the
1930s,
in the
postwar period prefabricated
suburban
homes,
washing
machines,
refrigerators,
and
luxury goods
for the masses eroded class-based identi-
ties. National chains
supplanted
local,
ethnically
based
stores;
national
broadcasting
networks
edged
out local radio
programming;
and televi-
sion discovered in the
working-class family
the material of sitcoms.
In this
context,
a new ethic of
maturity, responsibility,
and adulthood
unfolded,
simultaneously shaped by
and,
in
turn,
shaping psychoanalysis.
In Erik
Erikson's definition,
the mature
person
was "tolerant of differ-
ences,
cautious and methodical in
evaluation,
just
in
judgment,
circum-
spect
in
action,
and ...
capable
of faith and
indignation."23 Reflecting
women's
historic stress on the
significance
of the
family,
and middle-class
as
opposed
to
working-class
norms,
maturity
also
implied
men's
rejection
of the
homosocial,
adolescent world of mates or
buddies,
their reorienta-
tion to the heterosexual
dyad,
and their
acceptance
of the
responsibilities
of
marriage. Finally, maturity implied
the
acceptance
of limits. In
Philip
Rieff's
formulation,
it meant
"resign[ing] yourself
to
living
within
your
moral means ...
suffer[ing]
no
gratuitous
failures in a futile search for
ethical
heights."24
Key
elaborators of the ethic of
maturity, psychoanalysts
tied it to do-
mesticity. Infusing
the
private,
familial realm with charismatic
meanings
associated with
sexuality,
the
deep
self,
and
personal
life,
they
resanctified
heterosexuality
and
marriage.
In the New Deal
epoch
the
family
had
been
relatively
mundane: a
sphere
of resisted female
authority
for men
and of unremunerated work for women. In the
1950s, however,
it became
an
intensely
invested
sphere
of
personal meanings
for both
sexes,
per-
haps especially for
women. While there is
certainly
truth in the later femi-
nist
portrait
of the 1950s as a time when Rosie the Riveter was
unwillingly
pushed
back into the
home,
it is not the whole truth. Women
comprised
a
majority
of Freud's readers and of
analytic patients; many
believed in
the new ideals of the
home,
the
profound significance
of
early
childhood,
the
ethically meaningful growth
of domestic
consumption,
and the associ-
ated ethic of
maturity.25
Postwar
films reflected not
only
women's
ambiva-
23.
Quoted
in
Christopher
Lasch,
Haven in a Heartless World: The
Family Besieged (New
York, 1977),
p.
108.
24.
Philip
Rieff,
"Reflections on
Psychological
Man in
America,"
The
Feeling
Intellect:
Selected
Writings,
ed.
Jonathan
B. Imber
(Chicago, 1990), p.
8.
25. David
Riesman,
one of the most subtle observers of the
1950s,
discusses Freud's
female
readership
in Abundance
for
What?
(1964;
New
Brunswick,
N.J., 1993).
It is also true
that women read more than men in
general.
More
broadly,
the
totalizing rejection
of
psy-
choanalysis by
1970s feminists obscured the
complexity
of women's relations to
psychoanal-
ysis.
Even in the darkest
period
of the
1950s,
such
analysts
as
Phyllis
Greenacre,
Grete
Bibring,
Edith
Jacobson
and Viola
Klein,
as well as
Benjamin Spock
and
Roy
Schafer,
en-
340
Eli
Zaretsky Domesticity
and
Psychoanalysis
lence about
domesticity
but also their commitment to
it.26
The 1956
movie The Man in the
Gray
Flannel Suit was emblematic. The wife
(Jennifer
Jones) longs
for a nicer house and
pushes
her husband
(Gregory
Peck)
to
earn more
money.
Yet her insistence on
personal integrity
is counter-
posed
to the
shallow,
empty yes-men
he encounters in his new
job
in
pub-
lic relations. And she matures over the course of the film. At the
climax,
having
learned of his
ten-year-old
wartime affair with a Roman
woman,
she overcomes her hurt
feelings,
recommits to her
marriage,
and
agrees
to
accept
financial
responsibility
for her husband's war
child,
thus
symbol-
izing
America's financial
responsibility
for
Italy
in the
mid-1950s.
Masculinity,
too,
was transformed
during
and after World War
II.
Previously,
conservative
pundits
had worried that the New Deal was
pro-
ducing dependent weaklings. During
the
war,
General
George
C. Mar-
shall
complained
that
"while
our enemies were
teaching
their
youths
to
endure
hardships,"
ours had been weakened
by government
"handouts."27
In
1943, however,
Dwight
Eisenhower censured General
George
Patton
for
striking
soldiers who had been
hospitalized
for
psychiatric
reasons.
"'Shut
up
that Goddamned
crying,"'
Patton had shouted at
one.28
By
the
time the
story
reached the
newspapers,
Patton was viewed as the one with
the
psychological problems,
not the inductees. After the
war,
the
Veteran's
Administration
helped produce
films like The
Men,
which centered on
Marlon Brando's
struggle
to
accept
his
paraplegia. Discharged
from an
all-male VA
hospital against
his will but for his own
good,
he is shown in
the final scene
dragging
his useless
body up
the walk of his
single-family,
suburban home. His wife asks if he needs
help.
"Please,"
Brando
replies.29
In
general,
then,
the
postwar period brought major
social and cul-
couraged
their female
patients
to free themselves from
subjugation
to men. The case of
Ferdinand
Lundberg
and
Marynia E
Farnham's Modern
Woman,
the Lost Sex
(New York,
1947)
is
symptomatic
of the
degree
of distortion that has occurred. In 1963 Friedan
singled
out this work's
description
of feminism as "at its core a
deep
illness" as
exemplary
of the
postwar psychiatric
worldview
(quoted
in
Friedan,
The Feminine
Mystique, p. 119).
Since then
the work has been taken to
exemplify
the Freudian
viewpoint
in women's studies
programs.
In
fact,
Lundberg
and Farnham were not
analysts.
When
Psychoanalytic Quarterly
reviewed
their text in 1947 the reviewer
complained
that the author's "constricted vision" was "most
disheartening.... [They]
turn the clock back to the
days prior
to the industrial revolution"
(Francis
S.
Arkin,
review of Modern
Woman,
the Lost
Sex,
by
Ferdinand
Lundberg
and
Mary-
nia F
Farnham,
Psychoanalytic Quarterly
16
[Oct. 1947]: 574).
26. At least three
genres
of film need to be
distinguished
in this
regard:
women's
films,
such as All about Eve and The
Women;
psychiatric
films,
such as
Spellbound
and The Snake
Pit;
and
romances,
such as The Man in the
Gray
Flannel Suit.
27. Black inductees were
frequently
described as
crying
at train stations because
they
couldn't bear to leave their
mothers,
which was taken as evidence of the
pathology
of the
black
family.
28. Ladislas
Farago,
Patton: Ordeal and
Triumph (New York, 1963), p.
331;
see also Re-
becca
Plant,
"Combat
Exhaustion,
Masculinity,
and
Democracy: Psychiatrists
and Their
Subjects during
World War II"
(unpublished paper).
29.
Quoted
in
Graebner,
The
Age of
Doubt,
p.
15.
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 2000 341
tural transformations. Social control
pervaded
the
military,
the work-
place,
the welfare
state,
and the
professions,
while the associations of
personal
life invested
marriage
and
family
with new
meaning.
In these
transformations,
charisma and rationalization were
inextricably
inter-
twined. On the one
hand,
charismatic associations
gave deep personal
meaning
and inner ethical motivation to such
apparently
external devel-
opments
as the
reorganization
of work and the new
reign
of science. On
the other
hand,
the resanctification of
domesticity
and the
accompany-
ing
familialization of
personal
life were
aspects
of rationalization. The re-
sult was to
destroy preexisting
communities and
group
solidarities and
to create
new,
bureaucratically
and
instrumentally organized
forms of
order--psychiatry,
medicine,
the welfare
state,
the
multiversity,
the
military-against
which the 1960s
generation
would rebel.
As we have
seen,
U.S.
psychoanalysts
were
important agents
of ratio-
nalization. Yet
they
were also transformed
by
it. The
key
factor,
once
again,
was medicine-in this case the
requirement
that
every analyst
hold
a medical
degree. Although
this
requirement
antedated the war and had
long distinguished
U.S. from
European analysis,
it was enforced with a
new zeal and
thoroughness
after 1945. Not
only
did all
analysts
have to
be medical
doctors,
but after the war nonmedical
therapists
had to
sign
statements
promising they
would not
practice analysis,
and
analysts
were
not allowed to
participate
in
reading groups
that included
nondoctors.30
Even
prominent European analysts
who lacked medical
credentials,
such
as
Erikson,
Siegfried
Bernfeld,
and Erich
Fromm,
were
marginalized.
Theodor
Reik,
the author of fourteen
psychoanalytic
books,
wrote that
he was
"really
...
expecting
a
royal
welcome" but found out that his
achievements counted for
nothing
because he was not an
M.D.31
Even
Freud was
powerless
in this
regard;
his letter
protesting
the exclusion
of Paul
Federn,
his
personal secretary
and a
founding
theorist of
ego
psychology,
was
simply ignored.32
For those who
qualified,
in
contrast,
medicalization
guaranteed pros-
perity
and
prestige.
In his 1953
presidential
address to the American
Psy-
choanalytic
Association,
C. P. Oberndorf remarked that
psychoanalysis
had
"finally
become
legitimate
and
respectable."
Two
years
later associa-
tion
president
Ives Hendrick boasted that
psychoanalysis
had become
"the brand that ... dominates the market." "Our
success,"
he
continued,
"hugely magnified
...
by
the esteem of other medical
groups,
has
given
us
unsought
and
unexpected powers," including faculty appointment,
student
selection,
and
powers
over curriculum and
accreditation.33 Anal-
30. See Samuel Z.
Klausner,
Psychiatry
and
Religion
(New York, 1964),
p.
226.
31. Theodor
Reik,
Here
Life
Goes On
(Berlin, n.d.),
p.
73.
32. See The
Correspondence of Sigmund
Freud and Sandor
Ferenczi,
trans. Peter T
Hoffer,
ed. Eva Brabant et
al., 2 vols.
(Cambridge,
Mass., 1993),
1:130 n.
1;
see also
p.
311.
33.
Quoted
in Kurt
Eissler,
Medical
Orthodoxy
and the Future
of Psychoanalysis (New York,
1965),
pp.
195, 197-98,
232.
342 Eli
Zaretsky Domesticity
and
Psychoanalysis
ysis,
Alfred Kazin noted in
1956,
was a
"big
business,
and a
very
smooth
one."34
But medicalization also transformed the culture of
analysis.
Commit-
ting
the
profession
to a
positivistic,
scientistic
outlook,
it strained the ties
of
analysis
to the modernist
aesthetic, intellectual,
and
political
currents
that had
previously
nourished it. Medicalization also
brought
a dramatic
decline in the
percentage
of female
analysts:
from 27
percent
in the in-
terwar
period
to 9
percent
in the
1950s.35
In
England,
in
contrast,
where
no medical
degree
was
required,
the
figure
was 40
percent.
In
addition,
the medicalized version of
analytic neutrality
served to distance its
prac-
titioners from
left-wing politics,
which had earlier been
part
of the ana-
lytic
milieu. Historians have now
demonstrated, however,
that the
supposedly
neutral,
apolitical,
value-free
analysts
of this
period
encour-
aged
their
patients
to
cooperate
with the House Un-American Activities
Committee,
helped
to resurrect German
psychoanalysis
while
sup-
pressing
the
history
of collaboration
during
the Nazi
period,
and
tacitly
condoned
Portugese
and Latin American
analysts'
involvement in
torture.36
Yet
here, too,
the
process
was two-sided. Even as U.S.
analysis
under-
went
professionalization
and
routinization,
the connection to a charis-
matic source of
meaning shaped
its inner life. No mere economic rewards
could
explain
the
discipleship,
the
self-denial,
the
years
of
training,
the
night
classes,
the monastic
demeanor,
the
secrecy,
and the dedication that
produced
the
analyst. Psychoanalysis,
above
all,
was a vocation. At the cen-
ter of U.S.
analytic
education was the
training analysis,
the
deep, dyadic
bond with an individual whose
authority ultimately
descended from
Freud. Its
aim,
as in the
training
of
any priesthood,
was,
in the words of
Michael
Balint,
"to force the candidate to
identify
himself with his initia-
tor,
to
introject
the initiator and his
ideals,
and to build
up
from these
34. Alfred
Kazin,
"The Freudian Revolution
Analyzed,"
New York Times
Magazine,
6
May
1956,
p.
40.
35.
Hence,
18
percent
of the members of the American
Psychoanalytic
Association
were
(older)
women and 27
percent
of the
(considerably
older) training analysts.
Even
so,
see Bertram David Lewin and Helen
Ross,
Psychoanalytic
Education in the United States
(New York, 1960), pp. 53, 245; Kurzweil,
The Freudians: A
Comparative Perspective (New
Haven, Conn., 1989), p.
208;
and Lisa
Appignanesi
and
John
Forrester, Freud's
Women
(New
York, 1992),
p.
6.
36. On the involvements of
psychoanalysts
with
McCarthyism,
see David
Caute,
The
Great Fear: The Anti-Communist
Purge
under Truman and Eisenhower
(New York, 1978), pp.
505-6;
Sterling Hayden,
Wanderer
(New York, 1964), pp. 371, 377,
387;
and Victor S. Na-
vasky, Naming
Names
(New York, 1980), pp.
133-43. On the International
Psychoanalytic
Association,
see
especially
Lucia
Villela, "Cale-se,
the Chalice of Silence: The Return of the
Oppressed
in Brazil"
(unpublished paper).
On
Germany,
see
Kurzweil,
The
Freudians,
pp.
56, 204, 207;
Gerard
Haddad,
'Judaism
in the Life and Work of
Jacques
Lacan: A Prelimi-
nary Study,"
Yale French
Studies,
no. 85
(1994): 214-15;
and
Regine
Lockot,
Die
Reinigung
der
Psychoanalyse:
Die Deutsche
Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft
im
Spiegel
von Dokumenten und
Zeitzeugen
(1933-1951)
(Tiibingen,
1994).
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 2000 343
identifications a
strong super-ego
which will influence him all his life.""37
The charismatic tie to Freud was also
reproduced through reading.
Working closely through
The
Interpretation of
Dreams,
candidates felt
they
were
participating
"in the
workings
of the most intimate recesses" of
Freud's
mind.38 Finally,
identification with the founder was achieved
by
writing,
the
activity through
which Freud's core
identity
was
established.39
As in the
history
of
religion,
the wish to
guard
and
protect
a charis-
matic source of
meaning
led to
systematization.
A
spate
of new
textbooks,
standardized
examinations,
and
diagnostic
manuals
appeared, including
the authoritative codification of
ego psychology by
its
leading figures,
Hartmann,
Ernst
Kris,
and
Rudolph
Loewenstein. In the
postwar
con-
text, however,
systematization
served rationalization. For
example,
where
Freud had
spoken
of the
superego's approval
or
disapproval
of the
ego,
Hartmann, Kris,
and Loewenstein referred to
degrees
of tension between
the two
agencies, thereby substituting
a
quasi-scientific expression
for
Freud's
phenomenological description.40 Similarly,
in his three-volume bi-
ography
of
Freud,
published
in the
mid-1950s,
Ernest
Jones
minimized
the ties of
psychoanalysis
to
art,
philosophy,
and
politics,
all in an effort
to avoid what Peter Homans has called the
"ur-anxiety"
of
psychoanaly-
sis-that it would be seen as a
religion.41
In his Standard
Edition,
financed
by
the American
Psychoanalytic
Association,
James Strachey replaced
an
37. Michael
Balint,
"On the
Psychoanalytic Training System,"
International
Journal of
Psycho-Analysis
29
(1948):
167.
According
to Heinz
Kohut,
the
training analysis
aimed at a
"firmly
established identification with an idealized
figure" (though
it often
produced,
in
reaction formation "rebelliousness
against
this
identification") (Heinz Kohut, "Creativeness,
Charisma,
Group Psychology:
Reflections on the
Self-Analysis
of
Freud,"
The Search
for
the
Self.
Selected
Writings of
Heinz
Kohut, 1950-1978,
ed. Paul H.
Ornstein,
4 vols.
[New York,
1978-91], 2:796).
38.
Kohut, "Creativeness, Charisma,
Group Psychology," p.
796.
39. The
importance
of
writing among analysts
also reflected their constant
uprooting.
In
1945,
at the
very
dawn of the
postwar
crisis,
Ernst
Kris,
writing
from
London,
sent a
memorandum entitled "Free Associations to the
Topic
What to Do Next?" It called for
"authoritative statements of what we believe to be 'true Freudian
psychoanalysis."' Nothing,
he
added, "is,
at the
present
time,
as
important"
as
writing (quoted
in Elisabeth
Young-
Bruehl,
Anna Freud
[New York,
1988], p. 271).
40. See Heinz
Hartmann,
Ernst
Kris,
and
Rudolph
Loewenstein,
"Comments on the
Formation of
Psychic
Structure,"
Psychoanalytic Study of
the Child 2
(1946):
16.
41. Peter
Homans,
The
Ability
to Mourn: Disillusionment and the Social
Origins of Psycho-
analysis (Chicago, 1989), p.
68;
see also
p.
17. Similar acts of
censorship
characterize other
publications
of the
period,
such as Kris's
early
edition of Freud's letters with Wilhelm Fliess.
In
many
cases what was
suppressed
reflects well on
Freud,
for
example, concerning
his
attitude toward infant sexual abuse. On
this,
see Maria
Torok,
"Unpublished by
Freud to
Fliess:
Restoring
an
Oscillation,"
Critical
Inquiry
12
(Winter 1986):
391-98. An 1960
English
translation of an 1883 letter has Freud
writing
Martha
Bernays
that he
planned
to live more
"like the
gentiles-modestly
. .. not
striving
after discoveries and
delving
too
deep" (quoted
in
Josef Hayim
Yerushalmi, Freud's
Moses:
Judaism
Terminable and Interminable
[New Haven,
Conn., 1991], p. 39).
Freud's
German, however,
refers to
Gojim-goyim-not gentiles.
Such
attempts
to
protect
Freud rendered the whole
analytic
tradition vulnerable to accusations
of
dishonesty.
344 Eli
Zaretsky Domesticity
and
Psychoanalysis
everyday language
with a technical
one;
affect-laden constructions with
neutral
ones;
German
cognates
with Latin
derivations;
and Freud's
pres-
ent
tense,
which
sought
to
capture
the timelessness of the
unconscious,
with the
simple past,
all in the effort to secure the scientific
standing
of
psychoanalysis.42
Finally,
U.S.
analysts
abandoned the relative
analytic openness
con-
cerning homosexuality
and female
sexuality.
Anne
Parsons,
Talcott's
daughter,
committed suicide after her
candidacy
was
rejected by
the Bos-
ton
Psychoanalytic
Institute for her failure "to come to terms with her
basic feminine
instincts."43
Returning
to
pre-Freudian
ideas that tied sex-
uality directly
to
gender,
Columbia
University professor
of
psychiatry
Sandor
Raido
asserted that the
concept
of
bisexuality
had "outlived its
scientific usefulness." "With almost
negligible exceptions, every
individ-
ual is either male or
female,"
he
claimed.44
Therefore,
as
psychoanalyst
Irving
Bieber
put
it,
"every
homosexual is a latent
heterosexual."45 Moss
Hart's 1941
paean
to
psychoanalysis, Lady
in the
Dark,
ran for 467
perfor-
mances on
Broadway,
but his
analyst,
Lawrence
Kubie,
attempted
to end
42. Thus: "Eine
groBe
Halle-viele
Gdiste,
die wir
empfangen.-Unter
ihnen
Irma,
die ich sofort beiseite
nehme, um
gleichsam
ihren Brief zu
beanworten,
ihr Vorwufe zu
machen,
daB sie die
'Losung'
noch nicht
akzeptiert.
Ich
sage
ihr
...,"
which is best trans-
lated "a
large
hall-we are
receiving many guests-Irma
is
among
them.
Right away
I take
her aside in order to answer her letter and scold her because she
doesn't
accept my
'solu-
tion.'
I
say
to her
...,"
became in
Strachey's
version "a
large
hall-numerous
guests,
whom
we were
receiving. Among
them was Irma. I at once took her on one
side,
as
though
to
answer her letter and to
reproach
her for not
having accepted my
'solution'
yet.
I said to
her
..
."
(Sigmund
Freud,
Die
Traumdeutung [1900],
vols. 2-3 of Gesammelte
Werke,
ed. Anna
Freud et al.
[Frankfurt
am
Main,
1961],
2:111;
The
Interpretation of
Dreams
[1900],
The Stan-
dard Edition
of
the
Complete Psychological
Works
of Sigmund
Freud,
trans. and ed.
James Strachey,
24 vols.
[London, 1953-74], 4:107).
See also Darius
Gray
Ornston,
Jr.,
"Freud's
Conception
Is Different from
Strachey's,"Journal of
the American
Psychoanalytic
Association
33,
no. 2
(1985):
382, 403-4; Ornston,
"How Standard Is the 'Standard Edition'?" in Freud in Exile:
Psycho-
analysis
and Its
Vicissitudes,
ed. Edward Timms and Naomi
Segal (New Haven, Conn., 1988),
pp.
204, 208;
Alex
Halder,
"Reservations about the Standard
Edition,"
in Freud in
Exile,
pp.
212-13;
and Helmut
Junker,
"On the Difficulties of
Retranslating
Freud into
English:
Read-
ing Experiences
of a German
Analyst,"
in Freud in
Exile,
p.
216. In
dropping
Freud's
every-
day language, Strachey
also lost
important ambiguities.
For
example,
Freud used the term
Ich, "I,"
to refer to both a
psychic
structure and the
experienced
self,
thus
preserving
an
ambiguity. Strachey's
translation of Ich as
"ego"
resolved this
ambiguity.
In
Strachey's
trans-
lation
"good"
became
"appropriate,"
"need" became
"exigency,"
"at rest" became "in a state
of
quiescence."
Nonetheless,
in
spite
of these
problems, Strachey's
translation was a monu-
mental achievement.
43. Wini
Breines,
Young,
White,
and
Miserable:
Growing Up
Female in the
Fifties
(Boston,
1992),
p.
183.
44. Sandor
Raido,
"A Critical Examination of the
Concept
of
Bisexuality," Psychosomatic
Medicine 2
(Oct. 1940).
45.
Quoted
in Ronald
Bayer, Homosexuality
and American
Psychiatry:
The Politics
of Diag-
nosis (New York, 1981),
p.
30;
see also
p.
28. See also
Charles
W.
Socarides,
"The
Psychoana-
lytic Theory
of
Homosexuality:
With
Special
Reference to
Therapy,"
in Sexual
Deviation,
ed.
Ismond
Rosen,
2d ed.
(New York, 1979),
p.
246.
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 2000 345
Hart's
homosexuality. Apparently
not averse to behavioral
techniques,
Kubie
urged
another
patient,
Vladimir
Horowitz,
to lock himself in a
room when he felt homosexual
urges coming
on. To be
sure,
analytic
practice
was sometimes subtler and more humane. In
1950,
Allen Gins-
berg's analyst telephoned Ginsberg's parents
to tell them that
they
had to
accept
the fact that their son
preferred
men.46 But the overall
picture
was bleak.
3. The
Repudiation of
Rationalization
Every
charismatic sect that survives
long enough
to become institu-
tionalized
eventually
becomes
rigid,
ossified,
and text-bound.
By
the
middle of the
1950s,
U.S.
psychoanalysis
had reached this
point. Appeal-
ing
to the most
private
and unsocialized dimensions of
individuality,
it had
become an
agent
of
rationalization,
a virtual emblem of the
organization-
man
conformity
and other-directedness the
age
so dreaded. When Al-
dous
Huxley,
in Brave New
World,
wished to refer to the mastermind be-
hind his
totally
administered
society,
he wrote of "Our Ford-or Our
Freud,
as for some inscrutable reason he chose to call himself whenever
he
spoke
of
psychological
matters."47 Even
insiders,
like Anna
Freud,
ad-
mitted that
psychoanalysis
was not in a "creative
period."
"If
my
father
were alive
now,
he would not want to be an
analyst."48
The
history
of
religion suggests
that when
charismatically
derived
churches
stagnate,
become
corrupt
and obsessed with
orthodoxy,
renewal
usually
comes from outsiders. In the case of
Catholicism,
there were in-
ternal
(monastic)
reform
movements,
to be
sure,
but
genuine
renewal
came from the Protestant sects. Likewise the routinization of Islam
sparked
Sufism, dervishism,
and other extrainstitutional
attempts
to re-
vivify
the
dying
faith.
So, too,
in the
history
of
psychoanalysis
in the 1950s
there were internal
critics,
notably
Erikson,
but the
deepest attempts
at
renewal came from
outsiders,
writers and social theorists who were not
professional analysts.
Yet the outsiders
appealed
to the same charismatic
sources as the rationalizers.
Antirationalization took two forms: conservative and radical. The di-
46. See
Stephen
Farber and Mark
Green,
Hollywood
on the Couch: A Candid Look at the
Overheated Love
Affair
between
Psychiatrists
and Moviemakers
(New York, 1993),
pp.
58-61,
and
Patricia
Bosworth,
Montgomery Clift (New York, 1978), pp.
203-6, 215-16,
230-33. For an-
other account of a
positive experience
with
analysis
in the fifties
by
a male
homosexual,
see
James
Merrill,
A
Different
Person: A Memoir
(New York, 1993), p.
229. For the
odyssey
of a
gay psychoanalyst
from the late fifties
on,
see Richard A.
Isay, Becoming Gay:
The
Journey
to
Self-Acceptance
(New York, 1996).
47. Aldous
Huxley,
Brave New World
(New York, 1969),
p.
38.
48.
Quoted
in
Jeffrey
Moussaieff Masson,
Final
Analysis:
The
Making
and
Unmaking of
a
Psychoanalyst (Reading,
Mass., 1990),
p.
167.
346
Eli
Zaretsky Domesticity
and
Psychoanalysis
viding point
was the status of institutions. Conservative
antirationalizers,
such as Lionel
Trilling
and
Philip
Rieff,
defended the need for institu-
tions,
professions,
and a
regular pattern
of social
order,
while
invoking
the instinctual and sexual bases of
individuality
as correctives to bureau-
cratization and
conformity.
The
radicals,
such as Norman
O.
Brown and
Herbert
Marcuse,
were anti-institutionalists.
They hoped
to liberate the
charismatic
depths
of
individuality
from the limits
imposed by
unneces-
sarily repressive
institutions,
especially
the heterosexual
family.
Both currents had links to the New York intellectuals of the
1950s,
among
whom nonmedical interest in
psychoanalysis
flourished.49
Al-
though highly
diverse,
this
group
of intellectuals shared a sense of the
exhaustion of Marxism and the limits of New Deal liberalism.
Having
long rejected
Stalinism,
they
had also moved
away
from the
Popular
Front.
Claiming
that the conflict between the individual and
society
had
become more
important
than class
conflict,
they increasingly
held that
economic forms of
struggle
were no
longer primary.
Some moved to the
Right,
but others turned to
modernism, existentialism,
and
psychoanaly-
sis in order to criticize mass
society
and mass
culture.50
In a
period
in which
professional
medical
analysts
had seemed to
refamilialize
Freudianism,
intellectuals in the New York milieu resur-
rected the 1920s modernist view that the
genuinely personal-as
re-
vealed in
sexuality,
art,
and
spontaneous
action-was a
permanent
resource
against
rationalization. That view informed the action
paintings
of the abstract
expressionists,
Clement
Greenberg's
and
Irving
Howe's
critiques
of mass
culture,
and Partisan Review's
interpretation
of modern-
ism as an effort to
keep
"a certain kind of consciousness alive in a
society
inert or hostile to
it."51
In
addition,
the
critique
of rationalization entailed
the
critique
of traditional Marxism. Macdonald
argued
that the
problem
of
modernity
was
alienation,
not
economics,
an idea bolstered
by
the
1961 translation of Marx's Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts.52
In some
cases, moreover,
New York
intellectuals,
like
participants
in
the Harlem Renaissance before
them,
drew
upon
African American mu-
sic, literature,
and
protest thought
to criticize normalization. For
many,
racial
injustice exemplified
the
dehumanization,
loss of
identity,
and du-
plicity
that characterized modern
society. Ralph
Ellison's
Invisible
Man,
49. Of course there were other centers of antirationalization besides the New York
intellectuals,
including
Black Mountain
College,
the Southern civil
rights
movement,
the
San Francisco beat
scene,
and Brandeis
University,
where Marcuse
taught.
50. See Richard
King,
The
Party of
Eros: Radical Social
Thought
and the Realm
of
Freedom
(Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1972); James
Burkhart
Gilbert,
Writers
and Partisans: A
History of Literary
Radicalism in America
(New York, 1968).
51. William
Barrett,
quoted
in
Hugh
Wilford,
The New York Intellectuals: From
Vanguard
to Institution
(New York, 1995),
p.
66.
52. See
Dwight
Macdonald,
"The Root Is Man: Part
Two,"
Politics 3
(July 1946):
194-
214,
and Erich
Fromm, Marx's
Concept of
Man
(New York, 1961),
which contains a translation
of Marx's Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts by T.
B. Bottomore.
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 2000 347
Richard
Wright's pioneering attempts
to link
modernity
and racial iden-
tity,
and
James
Baldwin's
early explorations
of the
interplay
of racial and
sexual
identity
reflected this
view.53
For 1950s
intellectuals, moreover,
Af-
rican American culture offered resources for
transcending
dehumaniza-
tion-for
example,
the
intensely personal spontaneity ofjazz,
the sadness
and ambivalence of the
blues,
and the looseness and
sexuality
of mari-
juana.
For
many,
Freud was at the center of this
antirationalizing
return
to the
personal.
Some commentators saw
psychoanalysis
as the heir to
Marxism. A 1948 article in
Commentary
contended that "when the
political
cliques
of the 30s lost their
passion
and
died,
they
never
really
died,
but
rose to the bosom of the Father and were
strangely transmogrified. Psy-
choanalysis
is the new
look."54
In his
autobiography,
Arthur Miller
re-
called the
extraordinary
fascination with
psychoanalysis
that
began
in the
late 1940s. New
York,
he
wrote,
was swollen with rivulets of
dispossessed
liberals and leftists in
chaotic
flight
from the bombarded old castle of
self-denial,
with its
infinite confidence in social
progress
and its
authentication-through-
political
correctness.... As
always,
the American
self..,
needed a
scheme of morals to administer.... This time the
challenge
handed
the lost ones like me was not to
join
a
picket
line or a
Spanish brigade
but to confess to
having
been a selfish bastard who had never known
how to love.55
Miller
suggested
that the
left-wing
intellectuals who turned to
analy-
sis in the 1950s had
merely
found a new "scheme of morals to adminis-
ter." But he failed to note the charismatic
protest against
rationalization
that fueled the return to Freud. A
pioneering figure
was Paul Good-
man-homosexual, communitarian,
anarchist. As World War
II
was end-
ing,
Goodman
argued
that U.S.
analysts
had fostered a
"psychology
of
non-revolutionary
social
adjustment."
Similar to the New
Deal,
ego psy-
chology's goal
was a "rationalized
sociolatry,"
"the smooth
running
of the
social machine as it exists." Wilhelm Reich
alone,
Goodman
argued,
under-
53. In
addition,
some African American
intellectuals,
such as Horace
Cayton,
coau-
thor
(with
St. Clair
Drake)
of Black
Metropolis,
underwent
analysis. Cayton
chose his
analyst,
Helen
V.
McLean of
Chicago,
because her withered arm and
gender
made him feel that she
would understand his
"handicap." According
to
Cayton,
in the
early stages
of his
analysis
he
came to see that race was a "convenient
catchall,"
a rationalization for
personal inadequacy,
a
"means
of
preventing deeper probing."
Later, however,
he realized that race "ran to the
core of
[his]
personality"
and that it "formed the central focus for
[his] insecurity."
"I must
have drunk it in with
my frightened
mother's milk"
(Horace
R.
Cayton, Long
Old Road
[New
York, 1965], pp.
258, 260).
54. Milton
Klonsky,
"Greenwich
Village:
Decline and
Fall,"
Commentary
6
(Nov. 1948):
461;
quoted
in
King,
The
Party of
Eros,
p.
44.
55. Arthur
Miller,
Timebends: A
Life
(New York, 1987),
p.
321.
348 Eli
Zaretsky Domesticity
and
Psychoanalysis
stood "that
analysts
who do not lend their
authority
to immediate
general
sex-liberation in
education, morals,
and
marriage,
are no true doctors."56
C.
Wright
Mills
rejected
Goodman's
"gonad theory
of revolution" but
drew on non-Reichean currents of
psychoanalysis
to
argue
that the tradi-
tional
working
class had exhausted itself as an
agent
of
change,
and that
new,
antirationalizing
social forces were in the
making.57
Trilling
dominated the New York intellectuals'
reading
of Freud. A
professor
of
English
at Columbia
University,
and one of the first
Jews
on
that
university's faculty, Trilling
had
long
understood Marxism's limits as
an outlook for
modern,
middle-class men and women. In
1939,
he wrote
that his interest was "in the tradition of humanistic
thought
and in the
intellectual middle class."
Conceding
"the historic role of the
working
class and the
validity
of
Marxism,"
and
acknowledging
that he was not
being "properly pious,"
he confessed that he shared the middle class's
overwhelming preoccupation,
born with
romanticism,
with "the self in its
standing quarrel
with culture." That
quarrel, Trilling
held,
was the
great
achievement of
modernity.
For an "intense conviction of the existence of
the self
apart
from culture
is,
as culture well
knows,
its noblest and most
generous
achievement."58
Unlike the medical
analysts, Trilling
situated Freud in the context of
romanticism. Freud's
emphasis
on
sexuality, Trilling
wrote,
"far from be-
ing
a
reactionary
idea ... is
actually
a
liberating
idea. It
proposes
to us
that culture is not
all-powerful.
It
suggests
that there is a residue of hu-
man
quality beyond
the reach of cultural
control,
and that this residue of
human
quality,
elemental as it
may
be,
serves to
bring
culture itself under
criticism and
keeps
it from
being
absolute."''59
Rejecting
the medical ana-
lysts'
focus on the
ego, Trilling
drew on Freud's
conception
of
sexuality
as
a resource to criticize not
only
totalitarianism but also the
oversocialized,
overadministered
society
of the 1950s.
Rieff's 1959 Freud: The Mind
of
the Moralist
developed
the same theme.
Rieff described Freud as the
spokesman
of
"psychological
man,"
the last
of the character
types
that have dominated Western civilization. The di-
rect descendant of "homo
economicus,"
but no
longer preoccupied
with
the
production
of
wealth,
psychological
man had inherited "the nervous
habits of his father." He was "anti-heroic ...
carefully counting
his sat-
isfactions and dissatisfactions." Freud was a sort of "investment coun-
56. Paul
Goodman,
"The Political
Meaning
of Some Recent Revisions of
Freud,"
Poli-
tics 2
(July
1945): 197, 198, 197,
201.
57. Mills and Patricia
J.
Salter,
"The Barricade and the
Bedroom,"
Politics 2
(Oct.
1945):
314. Another New York intellectual whose oeuvre was
profoundly shaped by psycho-
analysis
was Richard Hofstadter.
58. Lionel
Trilling,
"Freud and
Literature,"
The Liberal
Imagination: Essays
on Literature
and
Society (New York, 1953), pp.
32-33;
my
italics.
59.
Trilling,
"Freud: Within and
Beyond
Culture,"
Beyond
Culture:
Essays
on Literature
and
Learning (New York, 1965),
p.
113.
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 2000 349
selor ... of the inner
life,
aiming
at shrewd
compromises.'"60
Through
psychoanalysis,
Rieff
wrote,
the individual learned to "withdraw from the
painful
tension of assent and dissent in his relation to
society by relating
himself more
affirmatively
to his
depths.
His
newly acquired
health en-
tails a self-concern that takes
precedence
over social concern and encour-
ages
an attitude of ironic
insight
on the
part
of the self toward all that is
not
self."
Psychological
man,
Rieff
added,
was
"inwardly
alienated even
when ...
externally
reconciled,"
for he was "no
longer
defined
essentially
by
his social
relations."''
In the
1950s, then,
psychoanalysis
had invested a new
ideology
of
privacy, domesticity,
and
maturity
with charismatic fervor. Even
so,
the
transformative
possibilities
of
psychoanalysis
had not
yet
been
spent.
Conservative antirationalizers such as
Trilling
and Rieff
argued
that anal-
ysis
could
help
correct the
oppressive
influences of
existing
institutions,
ultimately relegating
them to mere external conditions. Marcuse and
Brown shared
Trilling
and Rieff's view that the modern self was no
longer
essentially
defined
by
its social relations. But rather than value the ten-
sion,
ambiguity,
and
discontinuity
between the
psyche
and social institu-
tions,
they
believed that the forces uncovered
by depth psychology
could
overflow and even transform institutions.
Writing
in the second half of
the
1950s,
Marcuse and Brown
anticipated
the final
stage
in the
history
of
analytic
charisma.
During
this
stage,
the rationalization and institu-
tionalization of the 1940s and 1950s was
repudiated
as
popular
social
movements revived the charismatic moment in
psychoanalysis
in an effort
to transform it into a
revolutionary ideology. By
the end of the
sixties,
that
attempt
had not so much failed as
metamorphosed
into new forms
of
identity politics, including
feminism and
gay
liberation.
4. Toward the 1960s
During
and after World War
II
the earliest
attempts
to revive the
critical moment within
psychoanalysis
came from within the Marxist tra-
dition.
Already
in 1942 Max Horkheimer had traced the Frankfurt
school's interest in Freud to the latter's
insight
into
"the
decline of middle-
class
family
life."62 But Horkheimer and Adorno's
implicit
benchmark
was an earlier industrial
society
with a small middle class. Herbert Mar-
cuse,
by
contrast,
was
writing
in the wake of the
youth-centered,
mass-
60.
Rieff,
Freud: The Mind
of
the
Moralist,
3d ed.
(Chicago,
1979),
pp.
x,
5.
61. In
1959,
Rieff
approved
of
psychological
man's
tendency
to view the demands of
the
public
world as
purely
external. But over time he came to
regret
its effect on
"therapeu-
tic
society." Christopher
Lasch's The Culture
of
Narcissism: American
Life
in an
Age of Diminishing
Expectations (New York, 1978)
was an
attempt
to radicalize Rieff's
analysis.
62.
Quoted
in Martin
Jay,
The Dialectical
Imagination:
A
History of
the
Frankfurt
School and
the Institute
for
Social
Research,
1923-1950
(Boston, 1973),
p.
102.
350
Eli
Zaretsky Domesticity
and
Psychoanalysis
consumption society
of the second industrial revolution. Whereas
Adorno and Horkheimer's 1947 Dialectic
of Enlightenment equated
narcis-
sism with
self-preservation,
and thus with a
logic
of
domination,
Mar-
cuse's
1955 Eros and Civilization
distinguished primary
narcissism from the
self-preservative ego. Primary
narcissism,
Marcuse
argued,
constituted "a
fundamental relatedness to
reality
which
may generate
a
comprehensive
existential
order,"
an order dedicated to
happiness
and freedom.63
Recall-
ing
"the maternal
phase
in the
history
of the human
race,"
as well as
"the
Nirvana before
birth,"
primary
narcissism
provided
new standards
of value
(EC,
pp. 230, 76).
Postindustrial civilization must be
judged
not
by
work and
productivity
but
by play
and
display.
"The true mode of
freedom,"
Marcuse
wrote,
is "not the incessant
activity
of
conquest,
but
its
coming
to rest"
(EC,
p.
115).64
Norman
O.
Brown,
a classics
professor
at
Wesleyan University
who
read Freud under Marcuse's
inspiration,
shared
many
of the latter's ideas.
But rather than
emphasize
narcissism,
Brown's
Life against
Death
empha-
sized
pregenital
forms of
sexuality,
such as
orality, anality,
and autoeroti-
cism.65
Describing
his
starting point
as the "the
superannuation
of the
political categories
which informed liberal
thought
and action in the
1930s,"
Brown's antinomian
reading
had an even wider
impact
than
Marcuse
(L,
p.
ix).66 Norman Podhoretz,
a student of
Trilling
at Colum-
bia
University
in the late
1950s,
remembered his shock at
discovering
Brown's work. Podhoretz had learned from
Trilling
that Freud had dem-
onstrated that "human nature was fixed and
given
and
not,
as the 'liberal
imagination'
would have
it,
infinitely
malleable
....
There was evil in it
as well as
good.
Evil was not
imposed
from without
by
institutions ... it
came from within."
Brown,
Podhoretz
immediately
saw,
"challenged
all
this." Freud's
pessimism
was not necessitated
by
Freud's
theory.
On the
contrary, according
to
Brown,
there was a whole new
way
of life
implicit
in
63. Herbert
Marcuse,
Eros and Civilization: A
Philosophical Inquiry
into Freud
(Boston,
1974),
p.
169;
hereafter abbreviated EC. See also Paul A.
Robinson,
The Freudian
Left:
Wil-
helm
Reich,
Geza
Roheim,
Herbert Marcuse
(New York, 1969),
pp.
206-7,
222. Much of Hans
Loewald's
writings similarly
ask whether the relation of
ego
to
reality
is "one of defense
against
an outer force ...
originally
unrelated to
it"
or whether the "relatedness between
ego
and
reality"
derives "from a
unitary
whole that differentiates into distinct
parts"
(Hans
W. Loewald,
"Ego
and
Reality," Papers
on
Psychoanalysis [New Haven, Conn., 1980], p. 11).
64.
Going
back before Marx to
Hegel,
Marcuse noted that the
ontological
climate that
prevails
at the end of the
Phenomenology
was
unpromethean:
"the
aspect
of
particularity
(individuality) passes away" (quoted
in
EC,
p.
115).
65. Brown
argued
that
"genital organization [was]
a formation of the
ego
not
yet
strong enough
to die"
(Norman O.
Brown,
Life against
Death: The
Psychoanalytical Meaning of
History [Middletown, Conn., 1959],
p.
132;
see also
pp.
118, 123, 128-29, 142);
hereafter
abbreviated L. See also
Marcuse,
"Love
Mystified:
A
Critique
of Norman
O.
Brown,"
Com-
mentary
2
(Feb. 1967):
71-75.
66.
Describing
the
religiously
oriented neoliberalisms of the 1950s as a
"politics
of
sin,
cynicism,
and
despair,"
Brown drew on Freud "to re-examine the classic
assumptions
about
the nature of
politics
and about the
political
character of human nature"
(L,
p.
ix).
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 2000 351
Freud's vision of
"'polymorphous perversity,'
a life of
play
and of
complete
instinctual freedom."''67
Brown's vision was
essentially mystical:
he
sought
to use
psychoanalysis
as a
gateway
into trans- or
superpersonal experiences
such as those known
to
religious
and artistic
adepts.
Marcuse,
by
contrast,
was a
political
thinker
who believed that
psychology
could contribute to the
project
of social
transformation. Like
Trilling
and
Rieff,
Marcuse located this transforma-
tion
historically
in the new
possibilities
released
by
the
increasingly
auto-
mated,
mass
consumption society
that had
emerged
after World War
II.
According
to Eros and
Civilization,
in the
vanguard
of social
transforma-
tion were two charismatic dramatis
personae:
the artist and the homosexual.
Both
pointed beyond
the
production-oriented
and father-dominated het-
erosexual
family.
While
producing
neither use-value nor
exchange-value,
the artist
freely
created
meaning
in the uselessness of the modern artwork.
So, too,
the homosexual. No
longer
subordinated to the order of
procre-
ation,
he or she
pioneered
a
postfamilial way
of life. In
place
of
Prometheus,
the ancient hero extolled
by
Marx who stole the secret of
fire,
Marcuse
celebrated the musician
Orpheus,
whom Ovid credited with
introducing
homosexuality
to humans.
Although
Marcuse's and
Brown's
books were
published
in the
1950s,
they anticipated many
of the anti-institutional
themes of the New
Left,
especially
the
emancipatory energies
of
personal
life,
and
they
found their
greatest
audience
during
the 1960s.
Marcuse and Brown were
gratified by
the
developments
of the
1960s,
while
Trilling
and Rieff were
appalled.
But both radicals and
conservatives
appealed
to the same charismatic sources of
sexuality,
indi-
viduality,
and the
personal
unconscious.
So, moreover,
did the
ego psy-
chologists.
Thus,
it would be a mistake to read the
history
of this
period
as one of bad rationalizers versus
good
heretics,
or to
play
off a conformist
1950s
against
a rebellious 1960s.
Rather,
charisma and rationalization
were
always
intertwined: charisma
inspired
motivational
energies
and
ethical
'commitments,
while
rationality guided
these
energies
and com-
mitments into and
through
institutions. In both
decades,
the new
possi-
bilities of
personal
life
provided
the social basis for this charisma. These
possibilities supplied
an
underground continuity
between the 1950s ide-
als of
domesticity
and the 1960s
politics
of
personal
liberation.
By
the
1960s, however,
the enormous cultural
authority
of
psycho-
analysis
was
largely spent.
From the
perspective
of the Weberian dialectic
of charisma and rationalization we can
grasp
some of the
deeper
mean-
ings
of this remarkable
episode
in U.S. cultural
history.
The
strength
of
U.S.
analysis
had derived from its
apparent
fit with
long-standing
tradi-
67. Norman
Podhoretz,
Breaking
Ranks: A Political Memoir
(New York, 1979), pp.
48,
49. In contrast to what he considered the
"cheap
relativism" of such minor critics of Freud
as Karen
Horney
and Erich
Fromm,
Podhoretz
praised
Brown for
understanding
that "the
only way
around a
giant
like Freud was
through
him"
(p.
49).
352 Eli
Zaretsky Domesticity
and
Psychoanalysis
tions of
utopian
self-transcendence,
traditions that held that the state of
the individual soul was the
key
to
health,
happiness,
and even success. In
the
early years
of this
century,
its fit with this strain of U.S. culture had
transformed
analysis
from an
episode
in central
European
intellectual
history
into a world
phenomenon.
But the
emergence
of the United
States as the world's first mass
consumption society during
what we
might
call the
long
1950s
brought analysis
into
conjunction
with a
historically
new set of
possibilities: personal autonomy,
self-reflection,
sexual free-
dom,
and
individuality
in
love,
no
longer
confined to countercultural en-
claves and aesthetic
elites,
but available for the first time on a mass scale.
Just
as
seventeenth-century capitalism required
the transformations
of consciousness and
family
life
wrought
in
part by
Calvinism,
and
just
as
nineteenth-century
industrialization
required
the transformations
largely
wrought by
Methodism,
so the rise of an
automated,
mass
consumption
society required analogous
vehicles for the transformation of
subjectivity.
Psychoanalysis
was one of the most effective of these vehicles.
Triggering
internal,
charismatically originated
motivations,
it
encouraged
individu-
als to transform the
family
from the tradition-bound and
production-
oriented unit that it had remained
during
the New Deal into the carrier
of
expressive individuality
that it became in the
epoch
of
globalizing,
postindustrial capitalism.
In that
transformation,
the
ego psychologists'
stress on
reason,
maturity,
and the
ego's capacities
to
organize
the inner
and outer worlds were as
necessary
as the
emancipation
of
sexuality
to
which it
subsequently gave way.
Psychoanalysis disappeared
as an ethical force when the new ideals of
personal
freedom and
individuality
that the 1950s had
sought
to contain
within the heterosexual
family
overflowed the
family, releasing
a rich di-
versity
of cultural and individual forms.
By
the
early
1960s
analysis
was
being submerged
into new eclectic
psychotherapies:
existential,
humanis-
tic,
gestalt,
encounter
groups. Reflecting
the
blurring
of boundaries that
characterized the
period,
the
analytic
world witnessed a vast
growth
in
"boundary
violations,"
transgressions
of the norms that were
supposed
to
govern
relations between
analyst
and
patient, forbidding especially
sex-
ual relations. The diminished
prestige
of the
analyst
could be seen in a
new wave of
deflationary popular representations.
In
Woody
Allen's Man-
hattan
(1979) Donnie,
the
analyst
of the character
played by
Diane Kea-
ton,
is in the habit of
phoning
her late at
night
and
weeping.
In Marshall
Brickman's Lovesick
(1983)
the
ghost
of Freud returns to criticize the er-
rant
analyst.
In Erica
Jong's
Fear
of Flying
the
"foppish,
hand-tailored Dr.
Ernest
Klumpner,
the
supposedly
'brilliant
theoretician,'"
appears along-
side Dr. Arnold Aaronson and his new wife "who was his
patient
until
last
year."68
In the 1960s a vast cultural shift
effectively
blindsided institutional
68. Erica
Jong,
Fear
of Flying:
A Novel
(New York, 1973),
p.
5.
Critical
Inquiry
Winter 2000 353
psychoanalysis.69 Having effectively
served as the "Protestantism" of the
epoch
of mass
production
and mass
consumption,
it lost its
bearings
in
the
epoch
of
globalization,
decolonization,
and the
large-scale entry
of
women into the labor force.
Long
before the attacks of feminists and
gay
activists internal
depression
had
already
set in. A series of still
unpub-
lished interviews with
analysts
in the late 1960s did not find one with an
optimistic
word to
say
about the
profession.
Several
respondents
cited
Hartmann in
particular
as a demoralized
figure
whose brilliance had
been
destroyed by
his subservience to
Freud.7"
In
1966,
for the first
time,
a
major meeting
was canceled for lack of interest. American
Psychoana-
lytic
Association President Leo
Rangell reported
a
"change
in the
hospi-
tality, ranging up
to
sharp hostility,
in the scientific and intellectual
community,
in medicine and in the
public press."71
Later,
Rieff observed
that Freud had died a "second
death,"
his creation ruined
by "popular
(and commercial)
pressure upon
it to
help produce
a
symbolic
for the
reorganization
of
personality."72
By
the end of the
1960s,
the
psychoanalytic
church stood
rigid,
or-
thodox,
and
nakedly hypocritical.
Its theoretical
apparatus
reminded one
observer of "a
ship
at
anchor,
once fitted out for a
great voyage,
but sails
now
furled,
ropes flapping,
motion stilled."" The
ubiquity
of the
thera-
peutic
mode,
the culture of
celebrity
and
confession,
the colossal dream-
like screens of the film
palaces,
had all attenuated its claim to access a
secret and
privileged
domain. Ideas it had once
bravely pioneered
had
become doxa. At the
gates
of the church were the rebellious
dissenters,
the
Protestants,
the saints.
Inside,
the
great systematizers,
such as Otto
Kernberg, sought
to defend the faith
by summing up
the whole
tradition,
while others defected to the
opposition. Rejecting
what he called the
"courageously facing
the truth
morality"
of 1950s
ego psychology,
Kern-
berg's
rival Heinz Kohut
urged analysts
to take an "affirmative attitude
toward
narcissism,"
akin to that of the
supportive, nonanalytic therapies
then
proliferating.74
In
Paris,
Jacques
Lacan,
also
attacking ego psychol-
ogy,
called for a return to
Freud,
who had somehow meanwhile become
amalgamated
with French structuralism and German
philosophy.
New
"relational"
psychologies proliferated, many
with a feminist twist.
The
history
of
religion suggests
that there are
ultimately only
two
69. See
Zaretsky,
"Freud's Hatchet Man in an
Age
of
Deidealization,"
American
Imago
53
(Winter 1996):
385-403.
70. See the interviews with
Raido, Balint,
Abram
Kardiner,
and others in the oral his-
tory
collection,
Butler
Library,
Columbia
University.
71. Leo
Rangell, "Psychoanalysis-A
Current
Look,"
Journal of
the
American
Psychoana-
lytic
Association 15
(Apr. 1967):
425.
72.
Rieff, Freud,
p.
359 and The
Triumph of
the
Therapeutic:
Uses
of
Faith
after
Freud
(Lon-
don, 1966),
p.
21.
73. "It is not as if theoretical winds were
lacking
to drive it. But the motive to
go
somewhere is
missing" (Mary Douglas,
In the Active Voice
[London, 1982], p. 14).
74.
Kohut,
"Thoughts
on Narcissism and Narcissistic
Rage,"
The
Searchfor
the
Self
2:618.
354 Eli
Zaretsky Domesticity
and
Psychoanalysis
alternatives in the midst of a crisis of faith of this
magnitude:
the antino-
mian who
goes
to the
depths
of the self and seeks a
deeper,
more
genuine
truth and the Arminian who
goes
outward to reform
morals, attitudes,
and collective behavior. In the 1960s the charismatic forces linked to anal-
ysis
took an
antinomian,
transgressive
form:
drugs;
music;
sexuality;
al-
ternative
lifestyles;
the valorization of
madness,
as in R. D.
Laing
or Doris
Lessing;
and the creation of sanctified communities or communes. But
the antinomian
rejection
of the
ego,
the
everyday,
and the
mundane,
like
the charismatic moment to which it
appeals,
is
impossible
to sustain.
By
1968,
the
strong
surrealist or countercultural elements of the New Left
had externalized what had
previously
been
private
and
repressed, espe-
cially sexuality.
The issues that
ego psychology
had described as
intrapsy-
chic and familial were
being
acted out on a social scale and on a
political
stage. Energies
turned outward to reform
society
and create the beloved
community
in the so-called real
world,
leaving behind-temporarily-
the so-called world of the
psyche.75
The
emergence, triumph,
and dissolution of
psychoanalysis
was one
of the
signal
events of the twentieth
century.
Its
history
illuminates,
far
more
fully
than a mere economic or cultural account would
allow,
the
magnitude
of the transformations unleashed
by
the second industrial
revolution,
especially
the transformation of the
family
from a unit of eco-
nomic
production
into a carrier of
personal
life. Like other
great
histori-
cal
changes,
that revolution did not occur without
correspondingly great
internal
changes
on the
part
of individuals. These
changes
were not im-
posed; they
were not
merely
instrumental or
pragmatic;
and
they
cannot
be reduced to
changes
in ideas. Once a charismatic reorientation of that
magnitude
occurs,
its effects do not
disappear.
Rather,
they
become
part
of our
character,
our
culture,
and the inherited archive of our
memory.
The
waning
of the industrial
working
class and the
emergence
of
consumerism
required just
such a charismatic reorientation. Centered
on the
society-wide
embrace of
personal
life and
closely
identified with
psychoanalysis,
that reorientation
changed
human
beings.
It created new
possibilities
for
personal autonomy,
sexual
freedom,
and democratiza-
tion. Whether such
possibilities
are
realized, however,
depends
on
whether and how their
charismatic
sources are institutionalized.
That,
in
turn,
depends,
at
present,
on the
politics
and culture of the
new,
diversi-
fied, mobile,
and
internally
divided workforce of
globalized capitalism.
75. The
departure
of
Jong's
heroine from
analysis
in Fear
of Flying
is emblematic of
this moment.
Addressing
her
analyst,
she
proclaims:
"'Don't
you
see that men have
always
defined
femininity
as a means of
keeping
women in line?
Why
should I listen to
you
about
what it means to be a woman? Are
you
a woman?
Why
shouldn't I listen to
myself
for once?
And to other women?"' And then: "As in a dream
(I
never would have believed
myself
capable
of
it)
I
got up
from the couch
(how many years
had I been
lying there?), picked up
my pocketbook,
and walked ... out.... No more
arguing
with Kolner like a movement
leader! I was free!"
(Jong,
Fear
of Flying, pp.
20, 22).